The disclosed embodiments generally relate to the fields of optical networks, data switching and data routing. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments generally relate to an optical switch for switching incoming data to a specific output.
Recently, telecommunication systems and data networking systems have rapidly grown in speed and capacity. Accompanying the growth of these systems, however, has been the cost of maintaining these systems. A typical network, such as a local area network (LAN), requires a large and costly infrastructure. For example, groups of servers must be included in the LAN to handle requests from users of the LAN, direct these requests accordingly, maintain various shared files and other resources, and provide a gateway to other networks, e.g., the Internet. In addition to the servers, each LAN must have a series of routers and switches to direct traffic generated by the users of the LAN. The servers, switches and routers, as well as the users' computers must all be connected via cabling or a wireless connection. These various devices and connections all require significant power, cooling, space and financial resources to ensure proper functionality.
Fiber optic cables have been used to replace standard coaxial or copper based connections in communication networks. Fiber optic cables typically use glass or plastic optical fibers to propagate light through a network. Specialized transmitters and receivers utilize the propagated light to send data through the fiber optic cables from one device to another. Fiber optic cables are especially advantageous for long-distance communications, because light propagates through the fibers with little attenuation as compared to electrical cables. This allows long distances to be spanned with few repeaters, thereby reducing the cost of a communication network.
In fiber-optic communications, wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) is a technology that multiplexes multiple optical carrier signals on a single optical fiber by using different wavelengths of light to carry different signals. WDM allows for a multiplication in capacity. A WDM system typically uses a multiplexer to join multiple optical carrier signals together at a transmitter, and a demultiplexer at the receiver to split the multiplexed signal into its original optical carrier signals.
As both communication systems grow and fiber optic systems become more integrated into standard communications, the speed, and resultant cost, of individual network components is also growing. Huge investments must be made by telecommunication companies to keep up with consumer demand as well as technological developments. However, there is an unmet desire to design a data center having a single large, high capacity and low latency data fabric that joins all elements in the data center, e.g., processors, storage devices, network communication elements, and other similar components in a flexible and virtualized manner.
Prior art approaches at increasing the capacity of a data center generally require data routing at the network core, resulting in buffering (and inherent latency) to queue the data flows at the core. Alternatively, prior art approaches have eliminated some switching functions by establishing direct, out-of-band connections. However, these arrangements typically use electrical components which are not scaling in speed or performance at a similar rate to the devices the components are interconnecting, thereby limiting the overall performance of the data center.